director Kenton Bartlett:

One of the main practical considerations for Missing Pieces was to film in big locations to make people think we had more money than we did. We found the Salt Flats in Utah by using Google Earth. And to be honest, I’m not really sure where the idea for horse shoes came from, but I do remember it was one of the earliest ideas in the script.

On our cross-country road trip, our team included five people — director, cinematographer, sound man, and two actors. This shooting day was one of our big ones. We hired a crane operator who worked by himself. So our total crew for this day was four people.

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Working with a movie crane and an experienced operator is pretty amazing. The freedom of where the camera can go and what the camera can do blew my mind. The scene is very short, but our shot list was very long, so we exploited the crane and filmed the events from every possible angle we could think of.

The main difficulty in this scene was color correction. Half of the scene was filmed with cloud cover, and half the scene was filmed without cloud cover, so shots were very difficult to match. I still don’t think the shots match as well as they could, but it took at least eight days of solid work to color correct it how it is now. It drove me insane.

Also, the lizard wouldn’t cooperate, and the lizard’s close up was filmed months later in Alabama on a salt-covered table.

with commentary by director Kenton Bartlett

final salt flats scene without commentary